Before It All Disappears – Taking Stock of the Everyday
Alain BIET, João DONATO, Addis GEZEHAGN, Mamadou CISSÉ
Cities change, grow denser, fragment and rebuild. Yet amid the renovations and constant construction, quieter traces remain: everyday gestures, individual stories, familiar objects andarchitectural forms that continue to inhabit our memory.
A corrugated metal roof or a forgotten façade can be enough to evoke a world that is slowly disappearing. It is this fragile space, between presence and absence, that Addis Gezehagn, João Donato, Alain Biet and Mamadou Cissé each explore in their own way.
From 17 September to 14 November, 2026, PERSON – Paris presents Before It All Disappears: Taking Stock of the Everyday, an exhibition that explores the city as a territory of memory, where construction and deconstruction shape not only the urban landscape, but also the human experiences embedded within it.
For Addis Gezehagn, the city is a landscape in constant flux. His paintings and collages made from magazine fragments evoke the many layers of the Ethiopian capital. Architectural forms break apart, shift and reassemble, revealing the tensions between urban development and the disappearance of neighbourhoods and their inhabitants’ ways of life.
João Donato’s work turns our attention to the people who inhabit these spaces. His ceramics evoke the migrations, conflicts and bonds that shape the lives of communities. The city emerges as a place of movement, shared memories and experiences. Buildings become more than structures: they bear silent witness to the lives once lived within them.
For more than twenty years, Alain Biet has tirelessly drawn the objects that enter his daily life, depicting them at actual size. Together, these drawings form an archive of our practices and habits. Behind each object, a presence, an absence or a story comes to light. The seemingly ordinary bears witness to the passage of time and to what is disappearing.
Mamadou Cissé’s drawings offer another perspective. Drawing on his reading, travels and imagination, he creates teeming metropolises in which architecture takes centre stage. Between recollection and invention, these urban landscapes form a mental geography where real cities merge with dreamed ones.
For these four artists, nostalgia is never simply a backward glance. It arises from an awareness that places, buildings and objects bear traces of what is no longer there, alongside the memories and stories that keep them alive. Their works do not seek to reconstruct what has disappeared; they reveal its lingering presence, its resonances and echoes.
This exhibition invites us to look anew at the cities we move through. Behind every wall and every object, unseen stories endure, continuing to shape the way we inhabit the world.
Source: Galerie PERSON Paris
